Ignacio Matte Blanco - Strata

Strata

Matte Blanco saw a depth-analysis of the mind as falling into five broad strata: 'five strata in which there is a particular combination of symmetrical and asymmetrical logic' unique to each one.

'In what he terms the first stratum, experience is characterized by the conscious awareness of separate objects....At this level thinking is mostly delimited and asymmetrical' - closest to "normal", everyday life, to what W. R. Bion termed the mind of 'the "work group"...anchored to a sophisticated and rational level of behaviour'.

'A second stratum can be defined by the appearance of a significant amount of symmetrization within otherwise asymmetrical thinking', so that for example a man in love will 'attribute to the beloved young woman...all the characteristics of the class of beloved woman' but (bi-logically) he 'will realize that his young woman also has limitations and defects'.

'The next deeper, third stratum is one in which different classes are identified (thus containing a fair amount of asymmetrical thinking) but in which...parts of a class are always taken as the whole class' - symmetrization (plus a degree of timelessness).

'The fourth stratum is defined by the fact that there is formation of wider classes which are also symmetrized', while asymmetry becomes less and less. Thus because "being a man" is a wider class than ones men, women and children, being a man is also equivalent to being a woman and a child. 'In this fourth and rather deep startum, a number of the features of the Freudian unconscious are also characteristic. There is an absence of contradiction...also an identity of psychical and external reality'.

Finally, 'the deepest, fifth stratum is that in which processes of symmetrization tend towards the mathematical limit of indivisibility...thinking, which requires asymmetrical relations, is greatly impaired', and we are in the realm of psychotic functioning: 'without asymmetrical logic, play breaks down into delusion'.

Normal development for Matte Blanco involved the gradual mastery of all five strata, including the capacity both to differentiate and to move between them all; 'in abnormal states, this continuity of differentiation between the strata becomes fractured or confused'.

Thus, asymmetrical thoughts are at the surface while the symmetrical relations make up multiple lower strata that go deeper until an “invisible mode” or total symmetry is reached. In the deeper, completely unconscious levels, a statement such as “Jane is the mother of Jasmine” is, shockingly, equally valid as “Jasmine is the mother of Jane”! This statement reversal sounds preposterous to logical, asymmetrical, conscious thought, but the depth of the unconscious has its own rules. There, such a statement is true and incontestable. In this way, the principle of symmetry changes the asymmetrical to symmetrical or, put another way, the logical into the illogical. After all, the unconscious is the Realm of the Illogical.